1. Field of the invention
The invention relates to a data processing method for generating service interface descriptions in general and for dynamically generating service interface descriptions in particular. The invention also relates to a computer program product adapted to perform the data processing method and to a data processing system for providing a combined service interface description for multiple deployed services.
2. Description of the Related Art
Web services are commonly employed to provide services to so called clients over, e.g., the public internet. The W3C defines a web service as a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network such as the internet. Web services are frequently just application programming interfaces (API) that can be accessed over a network, and executed on a remote system hosting the requested services.
The W3C web service definition encompasses many different systems, however, according to common usage, the term refers to those services that use SOAP-formatted XML envelopes and have their interfaces described by WSDL. The acronym SOAP refers thereby to the simple objects access protocol which is an XML-based, extensible message envelope format, with bindings to underlying protocols such as HTTP, SMTP, and XMPP. XML is an acronym for extensible markup language. XML is a standard, which defines how markup-based languages are structured.
The web services description language, for which the acronym WSDL is used, is an XML-based language that provides a model for describing web service interfaces. In particular, WSDL is an XML-based service description on how to communicate using web services.
A web service is usually deployed to a web service runtime and thereby exposed to a client by one or more web service endpoints. Each web service endpoint is further associated with a service endpoint interface description which is usually implemented by use of WSDL. The service endpoint interface description provides specifications for the client with respect to the functions, data, data types, port types, messages, and so on, that are employed by the corresponding service endpoint or that can be provided by the service endpoint. The service endpoint interface description is a WSDL-based description of the defined service endpoint which can be exported such that a remote client may use the information contained in the WSDL description to locate and to remotely invoke features of the corresponding service endpoint.
A client must according to prior art request each service endpoint interface description of each service endpoint separately in order to get a holistic view of all features provided by the underlying services.